Curtains
When I undrew my curtains
in the morning, I was much affected
by the beauty of the prospect, and the change.
- Dorothy Wordsworth
The pleasure of a curtain
opening to the trial
of wind is particles
of air in motion. There is the hurt
government of an octave
to rake
into narration, a point to link
to some tempest
of roots. The thundershower
is a guerilla
of homiletic cabbage. The drip
of endorsement. Rimbaud
painted thought
with bees. Aluminum deer
now graze at the edge of the canyon
in a light bulb
of beautiful fog. Can you trust
this poem to drip
into gneiss
& make you rich
with revelations
of width? I don't know but it's getting narrower
as it gets wider & shorter
as it gets longer
& there is the preface
to a feeling
migrating toward the shadow
of Wednesday. Thursday
is a transcendental experience
within language, an iris
dilating into dill. The coconut
is a thesis of meat
& fluid, a sea
of referential aberration. Above all
language stands between man & a vast indefiniteness
of veins
in the scrotal sac
of philosophy's lens. There are, times I feel feet
are signs of walking, & then I run
to an aesthetic
like De Quincey's
The Pains Of Opium, or a pile of dimes
for the parking meter. What exactly
is the point of space? Speech is an energy
like the afternoon
suffused in a length
of curtain lie breath
assembled in pleats, a tongue
of sleep on the silt of a tone
of Wyoming in folds
of money
& Precambrium copper, water
dissecting rocks
into states. An amiable face
divisions incisions, precisions
of pleats, sacks
of peat, petals
the velocity of eyes
in folds of cloud unfolding a hill
Copyright © John Olson 1995
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